RICHMOND, VA., — Barack Obama, thrown on the defensive by his own running mate, staged a high- profile appearance with a team of silver-haired advisors Wednesday to assert his readiness for any foreign crisis that might erupt if he becomes president.
"Yes, we are going to face a number of threats and tests and challenges," the Democratic nominee told reporters. Obama blamed that prospect on "a bad set of policies" pursued by President Bush, which he said have produced "unresolved wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan and a slumping world economy.
"That's why it's going to be important for us, I think, to move with resolve in a new direction," Obama said after a closed-door session with his national security brain trust at a hotel in downtown Richmond, Va.
The question of judgment and experience -- especially on national defense and foreign policy matters -- has hung over Obama throughout the campaign, starting in the primaries. Lately, however, there have been signs that voters have grown increasingly comfortable with the idea of the Illinois senator sitting in the Oval Office.
In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll published Wednesday, 48% of those surveyed said they would have "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of confidence in Obama as commander in chief. That figure was up from 39% in August and, significantly, was just two points below that of Republican rival John McCain.
But Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, gave Republicans an opening to resurrect the stature issue with comments he made over the weekend. Biden, who brings years of foreign policy experience to the Democratic ticket, said it was a certainty that the 47-year-old Obama, if elected, would be tested by a "generated crisis" early in his term. (Obama was greeted by an editorial cartoon in the morning paper that depicted Biden as a loose cannon shooting off his mouth.)
McCain returned to the attack at a Wednesday rally in Green, Ohio, a suburb of Akron. "We don't want a president who invites testing by the world," the Arizona senator said. "Americans are already fighting in two wars, my friends."
McCain noted that Biden had mentioned President Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. McCain told the crowd he "had a little personal experience with that" as a Navy pilot aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Enterprise, dispatched to the Caribbean. "I was ready to go into combat at any minute," McCain recalled. "I know how close we came to nuclear war. And I will not be a president that needs to be tested."
